Friday, June 19, 2015

Beyond the Law of Contrasts: An Idealized Reality

We move beyond the Law of Contrasts when we have gained the intelligence to process versal codes more idealistically. Once we no longer require actual or perceived contrasts to process reality--hunger to make food taste good; awareness of others in misery to make our own leisure enjoyable; pain to help us define our pleasure--we can contribute more to the construction of reality through idealism.

"Idealism" is a distorted term here, because the less developed have associated it with "impossibility." But that's not the connotation which we're using right now. We're using "idealism" to refer to a way of conceptualizing versal coding in which our standalone routines are able to experience and transmit ideas and sensations without the presence of contrasting sensations to define them.

This is a pretty difficult thing to learn. Give it a try, though. Imagine that it is possible for all of the following conditions to be simultaneously true:

Condition 1: The United States is a historically racist nation, in the pejorative, enduringly harmful and abjectly unfair sense of the term "racism," and both domestically and internationally it murders people for profit without compunction.

Condition 2: A set of sub-Saharan-derived African Americans commits an extremely disproportionate number of violent crimes compared to their share of the American population, including the specifically racist targeting of perceived southeast Asians and perceived whites as sets, respectively, in ways wholly unrelated to income, education, or who may or may not have been poor/enslaved/mistreated at any given point in time, by comparison to all other genetic groupings on the planet Earth.

Condition 3: A large set of European Americans gains ostracism by passionately espousing Condition 2 and defiantly ignoring mountains of evidence of Condition 1.

Condition 4: A large set of Americans gains massive quantities of money, popularity, and political power by passionately espousing Condition 1 and ignoring mountains of evidence of Condition 2.

We can see the utility of being part of either of the latter sets--it's reassuring, to people at certain stages of development, to have a "side," and to feel vindicated in that side--and to genuinely, if partly, be vindicated, each time some new atrocity comes to pass--and we can see how the relative comfort of each side can encourage a lack of further development. Which isn't to mention the money and popularity to be gained, during various historical periods, by disregarding any unpopular set of evidence. These kinds of condition sets can be found in lots of other places, too, e.g. the Terra 2015 false conflation (the fabrication of a contrast for the purposes of the simple-minded) of personal sexuality and mandatory sexuality.

It's becoming more and more easy to help people stop denying Condition 1, as elites manage a transition away from bandwagon disapproval of it (which condition used to be as unspeakable as anti-PC things now, and still is in some places). The result, though--just like the transition between different kinds of atrocious sexual repression--is horrid.

The really testy, distorted one right now for many westerners is going to be crime data derived from sub-Saharan African people. It can be highly difficult to compare that data to the matching data of ex-slave, ex-dungeon, ex-racism-suffering untouchable, ex-war, ex-crushing poverty, Irish populations--just as it can be very, very difficult for so many westerners to conceive of western blacks who hurt other people without any grand world-historical justification. It's a scary subject to address, because it suggests a swing back to denying Condition 1--but it doesn't have to. There are decent answers to all of these make-believe conflicts, and a large part of discovering them is learning to operate without using contrasts to help balance your perspective. Learn to walk/bicycle yourself, without someone's hand.

What does it mean if sub-Saharan Africa is in disarray because of Africomm and also because of its native inhabitants? Are we so selfish that we can't manage to conceive of there being some truth and goodness in genetic diversity, if that goodness is measured using metrics that we have not traditionally defined as successful?

What if the arrogant conquistadores who can't live without murdering and stealing, and the lackadaisical mud-hut dwellers who never invented the wheel, both really are what they think of the other? What if we're all exactly as bad as we're accusing each other of being? Every one of us?